


Just Another Word for You

by RedheadAmongWolves



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Families of Choice, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, PTSD, Post-Star Trek: Into Darkness, Pre-Canon, Space and its general space-y-ness, Tarsus IV, That is the technical term isn't it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-11
Updated: 2020-04-11
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:08:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23598880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedheadAmongWolves/pseuds/RedheadAmongWolves
Summary: Five places Jim Kirk lived and one that he called home (and it wasn’t a place at all)
Relationships: James T. Kirk/Spock
Comments: 23
Kudos: 206





	Just Another Word for You

**Author's Note:**

> Y’all when I tell you I’ve been wanting to write this since 2015…… y’all. Then it all comes pouring out at two in the morning five years later, as all the best fic-writing sessions are apt to do. 
> 
> I mostly just wanted an excuse to cry about Tarsus IV in public so HERE WE ARE. Vaguely non-linear timeline, as it starts in the present then jumps back. Heed the tags! i.e. we’re delving into heckin Tarsus IV for a sec so it ain’t gonna be pretty.

1\. The U.S.S. Kelvin

In actuality, Jim never set foot on the USS Kelvin. He was there for nine months, in spirit-- as Winona waddled through the halls, growing bigger every week, her belly a magnet for the gentle hands and coos of the crew-- but as much as he was the cherished space baby, the unborn mascot of the Kelvin, he doesn’t think it counts. 

Instead, Jim was born on an escape shuttle, hurtling away from the wreckage of his father’s gravesite, so if the Kelvin doesn’t qualify as Jim’s first home, maybe space does. The endless abyss of it. Unforgiving as she is stunning. She’ll take life away as easy as she is to give it. 

The Enterprise is idling through space between missions, a quiet pause between their usual chaos, and Jim is on the mostly empty flight deck, sitting in his chair, looking out at the black. The belt of the planet they’re passing by has become a graveyard of sorts for abandoned satellites from its people’s past, and it’s almost like traveling through time to see the vintage and the modern all collected here like sludge in a gutter. 

Jim hasn’t been sleeping, lately: there are ships exploding behind his eyes, and he wakes from his restless dozes to the voices of ghosts between the stars. They call to him. There is so much to see and so much to find. But there is something to keep precious, now, too, and that’s new, that’s something he hasn’t had to contend with before: there is this ship and its crew, all still feeling their way through the dark, learning to crawl now that they’ve learned to run.

As Bones so kindly reminded him on that shuttle, all those years ago, one tiny crack in the hull and they’re space soup. One solar flare crops up and they’re  _ baked _ space soup-- if it’s even possible to bake soup, but still. The point stands. 

Jim’s seen what space can do to people. It can drive them crazy, it can rip apart families, it can suck all you hold dear out of the very plane of existence. So space is probably going to be his last home, too, because if you think Jim Kirk is going to die peacefully in his bed back on Earth, you are sorely mistaken. 

But he’s not in this chair because he’s afraid. That isn’t to say he isn’t scared shitless, because he is, because he can’t cheat death forever, no matter what he tells Spock when he’s grinning and Spock’s rolling his eyes on the warp pad, having just narrowly escaped the jaws of whatever hellspawn the universe chucked at them that day. He’s in this chair because the goal is bigger than his fear. 

Jim was born with all of space as his hometown. He doesn’t intend to be a stranger. 

  
  
2\. Iowa

Iowa’s not a terrible place to grow up: it’s pretty and quiet and safe, and Jim has a roof over his head and food on the table and he likes his school, it’s just. It’s a terrible place to be lonely. 

When school is in session, Jim’s okay, but when the summer comes, it’s like Jim can’t outrun it fast enough. Winona is off planet more than she is on planet, and Frank is a nightmare when he’s sober, let alone when he’s drunk, but Jim has Sam, at least, though not so much now that they’re older and Sam’s got a girlfriend and is applying to college programs that aren’t Starfleet, much to Winona’s dismay. Their classmates go on vacations to exotic places like normal families do during the summer months, so Jim spends a lot of time outside, by himself, trying to avoid Frank’s ire and matching belt. 

Sam finds him in the late afternoon in the shadow of a silo, asleep. He’s jerked awake by a kick to his shoe. 

“You’re lucky I found you before the sun moved, or you’d be red as a tomato by now,” Sam tells him as he sits down beside him. He ruffles Jim’s hair to shake loose some of the dust, but Jim swats him away as he props himself up on his elbows.

“You staying for dinner?” Jim asks in answer. He tries to keep the strain of desperation out of his voice, but he’s sure he misses by a mile, judging by how Sam’s not looking at him. Another night of Frank and Jim and their trademark awkward silence at the kitchen table, then. Jim’s not sure if he resents Sam or Sam’s girlfriend more for never inviting him to tag along, but he can’t manage to begrudge him too long. He’s Sam. They’re both doing what they can to escape.

“Got a transmission from Mom today. She’s been asked to extend another month, something about a busted warp something-or-other on Vulcan.”

Flopping backwards again, Jim huffs. “Vulcan?” 

“Yep. Only place drier than Iowa, I think.” 

Jim stares up at the roof of the silo where it’s eclipsing the sun. “She’ll miss your birthday.”

“Yeah, well, we’ll see if I’m here when she gets back.”

Jim sits up so fast he goes dizzy. “Sam.” 

His brother rolls on like he hadn’t heard him. “I got a baseball scholarship, Jim. Got the letter yesterday. I have to go find an apartment, have to start training, have to--” he cuts off, and squints off into the distance, past the miles and miles of corn, at something Jim can’t see. Sam had pictures of Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson on his bedroom walls, while Jim stuck glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling. “Fuck, man, I can’t stay here.”

“But--”  _ But what about me? _ Jim doesn’t ask.  _ I can’t stay here either. _

_ You’re leaving me too, just like all the rest of them. _

_ Why aren’t I enough? _

“I’ll send for you, ok? As soon as I get a job and earn enough, I’ll send the money out to you and you can come live with me, ok? It might take a while, but--” Sam looks over at him, but it’s Jim’s turn to look away, so his brother won’t see how bright his eyes are, the tears prickling underneath. Jim’s not gonna fucking cry. “I gotta go, Jim. I gotta go.”

They sit in silence for a long moment more, before Sam stands up and dusts off his jeans, and heads back towards the house. 

True to his word, Sam leaves within the week, taking his baseball posters with him. The next day, Jim gets a letter about a new colony, and he looks up at his stars. 

3\. Tarsus IV

Jim's life can be separated into two parts: Before Tarsus, and After Tarsus. It is four months After Tarsus and he is still in the hospital, still too skinny, still too pale, still throwing up whatever blueish pulverized protein goop they decide to give him that day. It comes in three flavors: nasty, putrid, and deathly. They're all the exact same color. 

But, it is something to eat. Jim used to chew on dead grass when the gnawing in his stomach grew teeth. He wonders if this experience will make him even more of a picky eater, something to torment Winona with later when he’ll ask for mac n cheese for the eightieth time, whenever he eventually get backs to the farmhouse, and whenever Winona will actually be there, but the doctors tell him he might not be eating normally for a long, long time, if ever. Something about the chemicals that had been sprayed on what things they could find to eat. Like the dead grass. Kodos hadn’t taken any chances. 

Winona doesn’t visit. Can’t, or won’t, Sam doesn’t say. He comes down from college on the weekends, and he brings Jim books but Jim can’t hold them up on his own, so Sam sits and reads to him for hours. Books about ragtag bands of kids striking out on their own against the world, books Jim used to love, but Sam stops reading when he sees the tears rolling down Jim’s cheeks. Jim closes his eyes and wills himself to stop. It’s wasted water. 

After that, Sam brings books about impossible things, things Jim can’t find himself or his dead friends in. 

The worst part about Tarsus, Jim thinks, is that sometimes it looked like Iowa. Once the fires had cleared or the chemical-sprayer bots had left, the fields were rolling plains of gold, beautiful no matter how brittle they were to touch or to dig through. The sky was garishly blue and the heat beat steadily on his shoulders, and if Jim faced away from the extra moon, if he ignored the clench of his stomach, he could almost pretend like he was back in the fields he had sprouted from, like if he just turned around he would find the farmhouse waiting for him, Winona or Sam or hell, even Frank in the kitchen, a cold glass of water all for Jim on the table. 

He doesn’t talk to anybody about it, not to Sam, not to the doctors, not to the shrinks Winona’s Starfleet insurance covers for ten sessions that Jim spends in silence, staring down each rainbow-skinned off-worlder asking for him to show them on the doll where the man touched him, or whatever. Jim isn’t going to talk about it, ever. As far as he’s concerned, Tarsus IV will die with him, as it should, because he didn’t die with it. 

A man stops by his hospital room one evening, only a couple weeks after he’s rescued, yanked off planet by a flurry of Starfleet officers, and Jim can peg this guy as Starfleet as soon as he comes into view. Something in the way Starfleet folk hold themselves. He has greying hair and kind eyes, and he gives Jim the saddest smile in the world when he knocks on Jim’s door. He introduces himself, but Jim doesn’t catch the name, because there’s still this fog rolling around in his brain and muddling all his thoughts.

“You’re one tough kid, you know that?” the man says, his voice reaching Jim through an ocean, through a galaxy. “You’re your father’s son.” 

Jim is dragged back into sleep, and dreams of golden fields shattering into stars.

  
  
4\. Starfleet Academy

Maybe he really did love being the only genius-level repeat-offender in the Midwest, because holding his own in Starfleet is tough shit. Not, like, impossible tough shit. Just annoying tough shit. 

A few weeks in he sweet-talks Bones’ roommate into trading with him, which Bones’ roommate delightedly agrees to to escape Bones’ poking, and Jim’s roommate is ecstatic to be free of Jim’s antics. He and Bones feed off each other’s manic energy, so there’s never a dull moment. Jim’s never had this close a friend before. He’s never had someone he  _ trusts _ before. 

It’s a needed buoy: he isn’t used to so many people. Nights in Starfleet bars can’t compare to days in Starfleet dorms, Starfleet classrooms, bobbing through a sea of red shirts. He could squirrel himself away in the library for some quiet but instead he adapts some twisted form of exposure therapy and just throws himself in it more, flirts and fucks and fights, though never enough to get tossed out, and he passes his classes with flying colors. 

He’s a frequent shadow darkening Pike’s office door, enough that they have an unspoken standing session every Monday to talk about everything and nothing, which Jim is trying to convince himself isn’t therapy, and he respects his other professors well enough because everyone at Starfleet has seemed to  _ earn _ their place here. Jim’s name precedes him more often than not, which is nothing new, but in Starfleet it gets him more awed looks than pitying ones, which he’s more than happy to turn into looks of irritation if it means they’ll get off his back. He’s not some prodigal son returning to follow in his father’s footsteps, no matter what aspirations Pike may hold for him. Jim’s going to be his own kind of captain. He’s gonna make sure the first name anyone thinks of when they hear  _ Kirk _ is his.

The night before the Kobayashi Maru, Jim sneaks in to install the subroutine, and yes he’s aware it’s not entirely ethical, but neither is the damn test, thank you very much, so Jim reasons there’s nothing wrong with a little fighting fire with fire. He’s just about to head out, to where Bones is waiting back at their flat with a preemptive bottle of scotch,  _ because if I have to be on your crew I’m gonna have a hell of a hangover to do it, damn it, _ when he pauses. 

He gives a cursory glance around, just to make sure he’s well and truly alone, and then, In the dim glow of the standby screens, he lets himself sit in the simulation deck’s captain’s chair, just for a moment. 

It feels… good. Really good. Natural. His fingers dance along the armrests, and he leans back until his skull hits the headrest, and he takes in the empty bridge.

He thinks of his dad. He doesn’t like to, often, because it makes him think of Winona and her faraway eyes and the increasing numbers of empty chairs at the dinner table, but for once he sets that aside and focuses on his dad, George Samuel Kirk, who was captain of the Kelvin for twelve minutes, but made those twelve minutes into legend. His dad, who before that, walked these very halls himself, sat in this chair and faced down a no-win scenario, but decided that was a risk he was going to have to take, because if he was anything like Jim, if Jim is anything like him, it’s probably that he really liked the feel of this chair. 

_ I dare you to do better. _

“I’ll try,” Jim says to the empty room. 

5\. The U.S.S. Enterprise

Around him, the Enterprise heaves her wounded breaths, and here Jim is in her lungs, crawling through her nervous system, fighting against the heat and the pressure he can feel sliding inside his body, plastering itself to his organs, and the lifeforce keeping his ship alive is going to kill him, but he won’t let her go down with him. 

He drags himself up the rigging of the core, and each press of his fingers to her steel is a promise. God knows why, but he pictures Winona’s cool palm, or maybe it was Sam’s, smoothing across his sweaty forehead when he was small and sick, brushing his hair aside so the fever could break. 

He is thankful for the Enterprise. For the time he had with her. With each kick he lands at the warp core, he counts off each thing he’ll miss: the crew, laughing together in the mess hall; Bones cursing up a storm when Jim stumbles into something he’s inevitably allergic too; trading eye-rolls with Uhura behind Spock’s back; the songs Scotty sings as he works; ruffling Chekhov’s hair as the kid delights at another successful risky maneuver. He’ll miss the stars, streaming past them as they hit hyperdrive, better than any convertible with the top down. He’ll miss each new planet, each new insane adventure. He’ll miss having a room all his own to come back to each night, with Spock just a stone’s throw away for another chess match in the quiet, stolen hours of the evening. Spock. Fuck, he’ll miss Spock most of all. 

For the first time in Jim’s impossibly long life, he wishes he could stop time. He wishes he had more of it. 

The core snaps back into place, and Jim is blown backwards, but he can feel it as the Enterprise roars around him as she launches triumphantly back into the sky. Jim lets himself give one more cry of victory, even as the tears start to stream down his face. 

His seconds are unraveling fast as he hauls himself back to the door to seal the chamber off behind him, his last band-aid on his ship’s bruised knee, and there Spock is on the other side of the glass. Jim almost wishes he wasn’t, so this wouldn’t hurt worse than it already does, but he also knows he would have been devastated if he couldn’t see those eyes one last time. 

“How’s our ship?” he manages, because the Enterprise isn’t just his, it’s all of theirs. Their home. 

“Out of danger,” Spock answers. Jim tries to smile.

“I want you to know why I couldn’t let you die,” Jim rasps, and this is it, this is how he finally tells him, his terribly loyal, thick-skulled, stubborn, beautiful first officer, his best friend, how he feels every time he looks to his right and sees Spock there, and what a way to do it, because Pike always did say Jim was the best cut-and-runner he ever met, and what better way to avoid the fallout of this confession than to die right after. 

So he summons what is left of the air in his lungs, hoping against hope it is enough, and,

“Because you are my friend.”

And Jim melts, and the words melt with him, right there on the tip of his tongue. He searches Spock’s face, and he knows this is going to have to be the secret he takes with him to his grave. They are friends. The best of the best. And they will never be anything more, not with the glass door between their fingers, not with Jim shuddering through his last inhale.

He watches those eyes as long as he can, until the world goes blurry before him, and then that blur sinks into a cold, deep darkness. 

+1. Spock

He’d heard his mom say it once, one hot summer, one of the rare ones she was Earthside. Jim was seated at the scarred kitchen table in the farmhouse in Iowa, watching her at the stove stirring a pot of mac n cheese and humming off-key to the radio. He doesn’t know how old he’d been, but he remembers his feet didn’t touch the floor, and he remembers watching Winona’s gold hair tumbling in sweat-curled waves down her back, shifting against the floral pattern of her shirt as she moved. 

Sam came clattering through the front door, his face dirty from playing baseball with his school friends, chatting about how one of their older siblings had left to chase a girl to Starfleet. He tossed his baseball glove to the table and rumpled Jim’s hair as he passed to go wash up, Jim batting half-heartedly after him.

“Their mom’s throwing a fit and a half, trying to get Starfleet to send him home,” Sam said. Winona hummed in reply. 

“Sometimes someone’s home is a person, not a place,” she said. She sounded far away. Jim looked out the back door at the cornfields, feeling something he couldn’t name, but which now he knew as abandonment. 

Now, he forgives his mother for having had her home be someplace that wasn’t him and Sam. He might even get it, he thinks, whenever he watches Spock from across the room, because the person you love is the home you choose, not the home you’re born into, or the home you’re left in. As many times as Jim has lost the places he has lived, he thinks losing this one, this home, this ridiculous frustrating beautiful Vulcan nerd, might leave him empty. 

Jim wakes up, and Spock is there. 

Spock’s hands hold Jim better than any bed, his voice is more grounding than any floor, the warmth of his skin is more comforting than any fire. His eyes are deeper and more breathtaking than any inky depths of space. 

Jim heals, and Spock is there. 

Across the deck, Spock looks up from whatever it is he’s doing as if he can sense Jim thinking about him, and then Jim remembers, with a flush, he can. The bond between them had crackled like a thousand volts of electricity as soon as Jim’s heart surged back to life. 

Spock’s eyebrows do that thing that mean he’s laughing at Jim, but also that he feels the exact same thing, because, Jim remembers, Spock has lost the places he’s called home too. So Jim beams back at him, dopey and soft and shameless, and feels a spark in the back of his mind where Spock is dancing an invisible hand around their bond. It sends a shiver up Jim’s spine.

Thank God shift change is in fifteen minutes, because Jim is currently thinking up numerous things that he intends to do to said Vulcan in their room in said fifteen minutes, things that would make any Vulcan blush, let alone Jim’s half-human lover. Spock shoots him a glare. His ears are tipped green. Jim wants to lick them.

Yeah, home is a person, he thinks. And Jim has finally found his. 

**Author's Note:**

> of COURSE the man visiting Jim at the hospital was Pike don’t touch me i’ll cry. Just picture me as the dude from the history channel but instead of ‘aliens’ i’m saying ‘parallels.’ But also aliens. This is Star Trek. 
> 
> title is from Billy Joel's You're My Home go listen n think of our space bois
> 
> don’t own Star Trek/don’t profit/disclaimers disclaimers disclaimers 
> 
> comments and kudos much appreciated!! <3 ty for reading and humoring my need to scream about Jim Kirk to anyone who’ll listen instead of just my stuffed animals


End file.
